F5 Networks introduced new offerings that provide advanced access controls and dedicated SSL visibility with orchestration capabilities to help thwart today’s most sophisticated cyber attacks.
While most traffic and data handled by applications is now encrypted, many security stack service offerings (e.g., firewalls and IPS) are unable to efficiently process SSL encrypted traffic at the scale and speed businesses demand. Beyond mere SSL awareness and offload, F5 SSL Orchestrator provides policy-based orchestration capabilities across the full security service chain for any network topology, device, or application.
Orchestration on this level groups devices into services to intelligently decrypt and steer traffic, allowing for independent monitoring, load balancing, and scaling to adapt to changing network conditions and increasing traffic demands. This marks a vast improvement over the industry’s legacy security model, where piecemeal inspection devices perform decryption independently, frequently leaving gaps for attackers.
“App security is the definition of a moving target,” said Clint Huffaker, Technical Solutions Architect at World Wide Technology. “Visibility is one of the biggest challenges organizations are facing today, and F5’s SSL Orchestrator gives customers the ability to dynamically control and customize the flow of encrypted traffic through security service chains. We have demos in our Advanced Technology Center to give customers a hands-on experience where they can see the level of visibility it brings to security tools in a service chain. Our customers want to work with industry leaders like F5 that understand the evolving threat landscape, provide a balance between application performance and risk mitigation, and offer effective ways to increase visibility and protect apps from malicious activity.”
Applications remain the principal gateways to organizations’ and individuals’ valuable information. F5 Access Manager protects sensitive data with a Zero Trust model while providing access for authorized users, devices, and APIs, guarding against pervasive threats such as man-in-the-middle attacks. Product features enable organizations to think outside of traditional security boundaries, empowering them to unlock additional business models and operational efficiencies without compromising protections around apps, users, and data.
“Applications are everywhere, and increasingly interrelated, with many added capabilities inadvertently yielding new opportunities for attack,” said Ram Krishnan, SVP and General Manager, Security at F5. “Our value proposition is simple: we give you the ability to deploy standalone or integrated security for all types of applications, environments, and use cases. Customers enjoy the versatility of world-class products, cloud-based solutions, support services, and F5’s broad security capabilities that can protect applications better than anyone else in the industry.”